Medical Sexism by Jill B. Delston

Author:Jill B. Delston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: undefined
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In a case of a white man raping an enslaved black woman, blaming the victim as being a “prostitute,” as if she could have chosen to have sex, let alone be paid for it, strains credibility to the point where the word seems to lose all meaning. In fact, use of the word only makes sense at all if the most degrading insult that could befall a woman is to be labeled someone who desires sex, actively seeks to control her access to it, benefits financially from it, and threatens accurate identification of paternity.

Feminists have argued that both the protection of celibate women and the degradation of sexual women under discussion in the abortion debate are sources of misogyny. Katherine Rogers makes this point in Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature. She states,

Of the cultural causes of misogyny, rejection of or guilt about sex is the most obvious. It leads naturally to degradation of woman as the sexual object and projection onto her of the lust and desire to seduce which a man must repress in himself. At the same time that he denigrated woman’s sexual function, the preoccupation with sex resulting from the attempt to repress desire is apt to make him see her exclusively as a sexual being, more lustful than man and not spiritual at all. . . . Misogyny can also develop as a result of the idealization with which men have glorified women as mistresses, wives, and mothers. This has led to a natural reaction, a desire to tear down what has been raised unduly high.[110]

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